The mountain wind howled through the pines, biting at Lóng Yán’s exposed arms as he lay sprawled across a thick oak branch, staring at the moon. The chill didn’t touch him, not with the soulfire simmering under his skin, but the quiet did. The absence of screams, of clashing steel, of Paris’ laughter.

  A single magpie landed on a branch opposite him, its black-and-white feathers stark in the moonlight. It tilted its head, one beady eye fixed on him, and let out a harsh, chattering call.

  Krraa-a-a.

  The sound was a key turning in a lock he’d tried to forget.

  He exhaled, watching his breath curl into the night, the present dissolving into the scent of polished marble and blood.

  The first time he met Winter.

  The memory slithered in like smoke, unwanted but inevitable. He had been fifteen then, Paris sixteen.

  ///

  THE FACILITY – FIFTH FLOOR

  The room was vast, opulent, and cold, a monument to wealth and power. Grey marble floors stretched beneath their feet, polished to a mirror shine. A massive mahogany desk dominated the space, its surface cluttered with antique curios and a single, steaming cup of tea. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in the pale afternoon light, casting long shadows across the walls lined with ancient weaponry and priceless art.

  And there, lounging on a deep crimson couch behind the desk, was Crook.

  She looked up as they entered, her magpie-blue suit immaculate, the reinforced plates along her shoulders gleaming under the light. Her helmet, sleek, featureless save for the twin amber lenses, tilted slightly as she regarded them. One hand held a porcelain teacup; the other rested lazily on the armrest.

  "Ah," she said, her voice smooth, ancient. "The bull and the fox."

  Paris twirled his katana in his hand, a stark contrast between the deadly silver blade and his simple civilian clothes: a clean white t-shirt, black trousers, and scuffed black shoes. He looked like he’d walked in off the street, not into a fortress of a legend.

  He grinned despite the tension. "You’re richer than I expected."

  Crook’s helmet tilted a fraction. Her voice, still smooth, took on a rhythmic, almost singing quality, a bard reciting an old, dire verse.

  "Did the moth, drawn to the lantern’s kiss, think the flame would grant it bliss?

  Or did it know, in its ash-bound fate, that some lights are only meant to negate?"

  She let the words hang in the opulent air, a poetic trap laid before the violence.

  "Tell me," she continued, the melody gone, replaced by pure, cold steel. "Was it not the height of foolishness to come here?"

  Lóng Yán’s answer was not words.

  It was a snarl that started in his gut and erupted into motion.

  "Shove it."

  He attacked, and as he moved, the air around him shimmered with heat. Violet flames, raw and sentient, erupted from his skin, wreathing his arms and licking up the hafts of his axes. The temperature in the opulent room spiked, the soulfire within him finally given voice.

  ///

  Before he could close the distance, Crook’s free hand moved, a flick of her wrist, and a sleek pistol materialized from her sleeve.

  She fired.

  Twin shots, impossibly fast.

  Lóng Yán’s axes crossed in front of him, the bullets ricocheting off the tempered steel with a CLANG. Paris twisted mid-step, his katanas flashing, deflecting the rounds with precision.

  They didn’t stop.

  Paris was lighter. Faster. A dancer’s grace in every motion. He leaped, flipping through the air, blades aimed to cleave Crook in two.

  She didn’t even stand.

  Her teacup still in hand, she jabbed upward with her pistol, the barrel striking Paris’ wrist mid-swing. His grip faltered, just for a fraction of a second, but it was enough.

  Crook’s other hand snapped up, palm striking his ribs.

  Paris folded, the air driven from his lungs as he was hurled backward. He twisted in midair, landing in a crouch, already rolling to avoid the next shot.

  The shot never came.

  Between one blink and the next, Crook was no longer on the couch.

  There was no blur, no sound of displacement. One moment she was a relaxed silhouette against the windows; the next, she was simply there, standing in the center of the marble floor, having covered the twenty feet in the time it took Lóng Yán’s heart to pound once. Her teacup was gone, her hands empty and held loosely at her sides.

  Lóng Yán was already on her, not a man but a vortex of violet fury given form. His axes, Heartspite and Soulbrand, were not just weapons; they were conductors for the screaming soulfire in his veins.

  He didn't just swing; he orchestrated.

  His opening move was a feint: a wide, roaring horizontal sweep with Heartspite aimed to take her head off at the neck.

  But even as the first axe flew, he was already moving. He pivoted hard on his back foot, using the sweeping momentum to whip his other axe, Soulbrand, up and over in a brutal vertical arc. The axe-head didn't just fall; it corkscrewed, tracing a helix of violet flame down toward her shoulder, a drill-bit strike meant to punch through armor and bone.

  First dodge: Crook didn't block. She flowed between the two attacks as if they were stationary. The horizontal sweep parted the air where her head had been. The helical strike cratered the marble where she'd stood a fraction of a second before.

  Lóng Yán chained without pause. His missed overhead strike with Soulbrand wasn't a recovery, it was a setup. He slammed the axe-haft into the cracked floor, using it as a vaulting pole. His body became a spinning top in the air, and as he rotated, he lashed out with Heartspite in a scything arc that merged the power of a roundhouse kick with the edge of the axe.

  But before his boots even touched ground, he flicked his wrist. Soulbrand, still embedded in the floor, disassembled. Its axe-head tore free, whirling out on a thin, retractable chain of solidified violet flame: a searing buzzsaw that shrieked through the air, aimed to slice her legs out from under her at the knees.

  At the same moment, his own body descended from the vault, a meteor in human form. He drove Heartspite point-first in a devastating plunge attack, aiming to pin her between the mid-level buzzsaw and the ground-level impact.

  This was his triangulation: the chained buzzsaw (low), his descending body (mid), and the piercing point of Heartspite (high/ground). A trap of simultaneous, layered violence.

  Crook deconstructed it.

  1. She leaned back, letting the screaming buzzsaw-axe whistle past her thighs, the superheated chain singing an inch from her suit.

  2. She sidestepped the plunging point of Heartspite with a micro-shift of her hips.

  But Lóng Yán had anticipated the sidestep. The moment Heartspite's point bit into the marble,he triggered a mechanism in the haft.

  The axe-head detonated.

  Not with a fiery explosion, but with a concussive SHOOM of pure, pressurized soulfire. The shockwave shattered the floor in a ten-foot radius, pulverizing stone into a superheated cloud of dust and jagged shrapnel: an area-denial blast meant to blind, disorient, and maim anything within it.

  From the boiling cloud of vaporized stone, Lóng Yán emerged, Soulbrand now recalled to his hand. He slid into a new, guarded stance, axes crossed before him. He wasn't just swinging weapons; he was fighting with geometry and physics, laying traps within movements, each failure designed to herd her into the path of a more creative annihilation.

  Crook danced. She flowed between the axes, the chains, the detonations, and the plasma, her movements effortless, her posture still relaxed. The violet flames licked at her magpie-blue suit but found no purchase, repelled by some unseen field an inch from the material. One moment she was leaning back, letting a chained axe whip past her helmet; the next, she was sidestepping, her elbow brushing his ribs —a touch that was somehow cold, a null-point that made the flames on his arm sputter and die for a split second— just enough to throw him off balance.

  Paris rejoined, his katanas a blur. But his eyes were not on his blades, they were locked on Crook, sharp and calculating.

  Lóng Yán had noticed. In the first, brutal exchange, Paris hadn’t been idle. He’d hung back for a crucial half-second, not out of hesitation, but to compartmentalize. His mind was slicing through the chaos, analyzing her flow, her structure, the invisible rules of her defense.

  As Paris launched into his breathtaking aerial assault — the spinning leap, the primary sword whistling toward Crook’s neck in a decapitating arc, a magnificent, distracting feint — Lóng Yán saw the signal. Paris’s eyes flicked toward the seam of her suit, and in that glance was a blueprint.

  A second Paris materialized from nothingness, his own katana already in a horizontal sweep, aimed with surgical precision to sever her spinal cord at the base of her skull. A perfect, inescapable pincer attack. As she flowed to evade, his real voice cut through the clash of steel, cool and focused even mid-combat.

  “Her suit most likely disperses force and negates energy,” Paris called, already adjusting his angle. “Kinetic and magical both. Your flames won’t bite unless we breach the field at the source.”

  Lóng Yán didn’t question it. Paris saw the system; Lóng Yán would break it. He shifted his grip on Heartspite, aiming not for her body, but for the space around it: a low, screaming horizontal throw meant to shear the air along her flank, testing the field’s edge with concentrated soulfire.

  Crook, flowing between the feinting katana and the saw-blade axe as if navigating a gentle breeze, paused. A dry, rustling chuckle escaped her vox-grille, like parchment crumbling.

  “Suit?”

  She said the word as if it were a child’s misconception.

  With a motion so casual it was insulting, she pinched a section of the sleek, magpie-blue material at her thigh between thumb and forefinger. She didn’t tear it. She plucked it.

  A small, neat swatch came away not with a rip, but with a soft, organic shushing sound, like feathers being parted. Beneath was not circuitry, not armor plating, but pale, flawless skin.

  She held the pinched material up, letting it dissolve into a mist of faint, blue-black static before it vanished entirely.

  “This is mere aesthetic. A preference for the color blue.”

  She dropped her hand, exposing the small, perfect patch of skin: pale, vulnerable, human, and utterly unconcerned.

  “I do not need armor.”

  Her voice was bedrock.

  “I am the armor.”

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  The declaration hung, more devastating than any blow. The dispersal, the negation, it wasn’t woven into fabric. It was her. An intrinsic law of her being.

  Paris’s feint was a trap with no spring. Lóng Yán’s targeted strike was suddenly aimless.

  They weren’t fighting a woman in a powerful suit.

  They were trying to dent a mountain with their fists.

  And the mountain had just smiled.

  ///

  Paris launched forward not in a charge, but in a fractal zigzag, his body a ghost in the space between breaths. His katanas didn't just move; they unwove the air in a screaming tapestry of silver. It was the Thousand-Cutting Lotus: a technique of such blurred, overlapping complexity that it presented not as individual strikes, but as a solid wall of undodgeable edge, a storm of finality designed to shred anything within its radius into molecular confetti.

  Crook didn't dodge.

  Dodging would have implied the attack possessed a credible threat. That it required evasion.

  She had already assessed the angle of every potential cut the moment his muscles tensed. She had already calculated the trajectory of each phantom blade before the first step of his zigzag was complete. She had already chosen her footing in a future where the attack had already failed.

  There was no movement. No blur. No sound of displacement.

  One moment, the killing storm of silver filled the space where she stood.

  The next, she was just there.

  Perched. Balanced with impossible, elegant grace on the flat of the live steel of his lead katana, as if it were a welcome mat laid expressly for her. Her weight, a mere whisper of pressure, was a silent, profound insult to the killing edge thrumming beneath her soles. The furious energy of his technique vibrated up through the blade, a scream that died at her feet.

  She stood upon the eye of his hurricane, utterly untouchable, and the storm raged uselessly around her.

  Seeing his opening, Lóng Yán didn't hesitate. He flung his axe, a roaring vortex of violet flame, intending to bisect her mid-air.

  Still balanced on the sword, Crook extended her pinky finger. A minuscule, almost dismissive flick. The air pinged. The flaming axe was knocked violently off its trajectory, embedding itself in the far wall with a shower of sparks and shattered marble.

  In the same fluid motion, she dropped from the katana, driving her heel down in a devastating axe kick meant to crush the second Paris's skull.

  He vanished in a wisp of shadow, teleporting not to safety, but into Lóng Yán. He rematerialized with a grunt, shoving the flaming boy forward, using his body as an unblockable battering ram aimed to crush Crook against Lóng Yán's own, already-swinging axe.

  She sidestepped with micro-surgical precision, letting the whistling axe blade pass so close it stirred the fabric of her suit. The decapitation strike was now a harmless miss. But the human battering ram was still coming.

  So she stopped moving.

  She simply rooted herself.

  Lóng Yán's shoulder crashed into her. The sound was a sickening, full-stop THUD—the sound of a bull hitting a mountainside. It wasn't an explosion; it was a cancellation. The kinetic energy of his charge did not transfer into her; it rebounded back through his own body, a wave of concussive force traveling up his collarbone and down his spine.

  His flames snuffed out. His breath left his lungs in a shocked gasp. His legs, still trying to run, tangled beneath him as his upper body recoiled violently. He crumpled backward, a puppet with its strings cut, colliding with a bewildered Paris and sending them both into a tangled, weapon-clattering sprawl across the cold marble.

  In the ringing silence that followed, Crook remained exactly where she stood, her magpie-blue suit unrumpled, not a single micrometer out of place.

  Her helmet tilted a fraction, amber lenses observing the tangled heap of groaning limbs. Her voice, when it came, was not loud, but it carved through the silence like a scalpel.

  "The battlefield is not a bed. Who granted you the luxury of rest?"

  ///

  Paris’s eyes flashed with gloom essence. A visible wave of psychic force -raw, concussive telekinesis- erupted from him, blasting Crook back a single, sharp step. It was the first thing that had moved her. In that split second of displacement, he vanished into thin air.

  He rematerialized directly above her, dropping like a falcon, both knees aimed to drive her helmet into her shoulders. She flowed aside without looking, her leg whipping up in a vicious axe kick that connected with his descending jaw with a sickening CRACK, dislocating his neck.

  But the body that hit the floor dissolved into shadow. It had been a clone.

  The air in the room popped. Five more Parises materialized from nothingness, suspended around her in a perfect, silent ring. In unison, their hands shot out. The air itself solidified, a crushing, invisible vise of telekinetic force seizing Crook from all sides, holding her immobile. The marble beneath her feet cracked under the pressure.

  Seeing his opening, Lóng Yán didn't hesitate. He thrust his hands forward, and a spear of violet flame, so concentrated it was nearly white, lanced across the room. It wasn't an explosion, but a surgical strike, focusing the heat of a blast furnace onto the single point of Crook's chest. The air around her warped and shimmered, the temperature skyrocketing towards that of the sun's surface, yet her magpie-blue suit didn't so much as smoke. He pushed, pouring every ounce of his power into that single, incinerating beam.

  It was a perfect trap.

  With a shiver of displaced air, the real Paris erupted into existence above her just as Lóng Yán ceased the assault, his downward flip lending terrible force to the silver arc of his katana, a blow meant to split her helmet and skull as one.

  It had been her plan all along.

  Crook’s shoulders relaxed. A sigh of disappointment hissed from her helmet’s vox-grille. She didn't struggle against the force; she simply... expanded. An invisible, concussive wave of pure will detonated outwards from her core.

  The five shadow clones didn't just vanish; they screamed into static and dissolved, the psychic backlash tearing them apart at a conceptual level.

  Paris’s eyes widened in sheer, uncomprehending horror mid-flight. The telekinetic vise he'd locked her in could have crushed a train into a marble. How did she—

  Crook’s hand moved.

  Not a block. A pluck.

  Her index and middle finger snapped up, meeting the edge not with resistance, but with perfect, absolute arrest. The sword, charged with his gloom and capable of shearing through dimensions, stopped dead. A single, high-pitched ping rang out, a sound of pure physics breaking.

  A flick of her wrist.

  SNAP.

  The katana, reinforced with his gloom, shattered like cheap glass. The shards didn't even have time to hit the floor before she struck.

  THUD. The one-inch punch.

  Point of contact, then structural failure, like she'd memorized God's blueprints.

  The force didn’t just hit Paris; it passed through him. The shockwave cracked the marble floor beneath his feet, but the true damage was internal, metaphysical. It reverberated against his very soul, a frequency tuned to disrupt the flow of energy. For a moment, his connection to the Gloom —not a power he wielded, but a fundamental part of his being— was severed. It was a perfect, brutal linkblocking of his core self.

  CRACK.

  A sharper, wetter sound followed. His teeth shattered from the force transmitted through his jaw. A mist of blood and white fragments sprayed the air, instantly soaking the front of his white t-shirt. The fabric didn't just stain; it changed, the pristine white blooming into a shocking, saturated crimson in less than a heartbeat, as if the shirt had always been that color.

  Crook stood now in the center of the room, her magpie-blue suit unruffled, her helmet’s amber lenses glinting like ancient watchful stars as she regarded them.

  The violet flames that had wreathed Lóng Yán were gone, snuffed out not by force, but by the absolute, neutralizing precision of her strikes.

  "Violence without understanding is merely noise," Crook stated, her voice a flat decree.

  Lóng Yán shoved himself up from the floor. His breath sawed in his lungs, each inhale tasting of blood and ozone. Her words, that calm, ancient certainty, didn't land like wisdom. They landed like a boot on his neck.

  "Gǔn nǐ mā de dàn!" he snarled, the Mandarin ripping from his throat. Roll your mother's egg! — a raw, vulgar curse for absolute dismissal. "Shut your preaching mouth, you walking corpse! I'm not tryna hear all that fèihuà!" Waste-talk! Nonsense! "Your noise is the only thing I understand!"

  Understanding? Philosophy? He was done with her lectures. The only language left was ruin.

  He abandoned all finesse. His body became a blunt engine of destruction. He settled into a low, rooted Hung Gar horse stance, but moved with the explosive aggression of Muay Thai. His fists, elbows, and knees became a whirlwind. A brutal right hook, thrown with the twisting power of a Hung Gar punch, aimed to crush her ribs. The force of it alone sent a visible shockwave through the air, rattling the ancient weaponry on the walls.

  Crook shifted.

  Not a dodge. A correction.

  Her palm met his wrist, guiding his punch just slightly off-course—"Anger floods your mind. Your body speaks its intent long before the strike."—before her fingers pressed into a nerve cluster on his forearm.

  His arm locked, the nascent flicker of violet flame at his knuckles snuffing out. A brutally efficient rising knee drove into his solar plexus, folding him in half.

  He gasped, stumbling back, but she was already a blur of motion. Her palm was already headed for his chest. Dreading the one-inch punch, he lashed out in pure panic, his claws tearing the air faster than sound.

  He never made contact.

  In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he was on the floor. Paralyzed. He hadn't seen her move. He didn't know what had happened. Only that he had lost.

  THUD.

  He hit the marble floor, paralyzed, his body refusing to obey, the soulfire within him completely subdued.

  He was injured, but Paris, Paris was dying.

  Crook’s one-inch punch had landed with surgical precision. The aftermath was a map of internal ruin. His sternum was a crater, its shattered edges driven into the pulped meat of his heart. Aortic tissue hung in ragged strips. His diaphragm was shredded, his lungs drowning in the hot, metallic well of his own chest cavity. Lower down, the seismic force had sheared the mesentery and ruptured his intestines in three places, a slow, septic flood beginning its toxic work in the dark.

  His breath came in wet, shallow hitches: each one a gargled, futile struggle, pulling more blood into his airways. Blood, already dark and deoxygenated from the heart's failure, welled up his trachea and frothed at his lips in a pink, bubbling gasp. His fingers twitched toward his fallen katana, a last, ghostly impulse from a brain whose body was already a corpse cooling from the inside out. The signal sparked, flickered, and died in the wreckage of his spine.

  Crook loomed over him, her magpie-blue suit still pristine, her lenses glinting as she studied his spasming form.

  "Tch. Your essence clings fiercely even when the vessel is broken."

  A flick of her wrist. A syringe slid from her sleeve into her palm, neon-blue liquid swirling with tiny, pulsing filaments.

  Lóng Yán’s unsuccessfully tried to get up. Poison?

  Crook knelt, her movements unhurried, and drove the needle into Paris’ carotid.

  His body arched off the ground, tendons snapping taut as the serum hit. Veins bulged black under his skin, then glowed sapphire, the regeneration forcing shattered ribs to knit, collapsed alveoli to reinflate, neural pathways to scream back online.

  Paris gasped, eyes flying open, not with relief, but raw agony. His scream was soundless, jaw locked in a rictus as the serum worked too fast, too hard.

  Crook watched, head tilted, observing the violent miracle of forced healing. "To breathe is to choose," she commanded, her voice cutting through the haze of pain. "Choose."

  Paris’ lungs obeyed before his mind could. Air hissed through his teeth, his body shuddering as the serum forced life back into him.

  Crook leaned closer, her voice a whisper through the helmet’s vox-grille:

  "The path you walk is longer than you know. I’m not done with you yet."

  Blood trickled from Lóng Yán's nose as he watched, helpless, as Paris stepped forward.

  He feinted left, Wing Chun chain punches, before pivoting into a spinning Taekwondo kick.

  Crook blocked with her forearm, the impact barely rocking her.

  "Potential blooms," she mused. "But roots planted in haste yield fragile fruit. Your center wavers."

  She countered with a Judo sweep.

  Paris flipped midair, landing in a crouch, already lunging again.

  He was good. No, he was exceptional.

  But Crook was perfection incarnate, a monument to honed skill across eons.

  She matched him strike for strike, her movements effortless, her breathing steady. Every time he adjusted, she revealed a deeper flaw, a fundamental truth disguised as a flaw.

  "Space invites intrusion." A finger jab to his ribs made him wheeze. "Reach exceeds grasp." A twist of his wrist forced him to roll away.

  Crook watched him rise, her helmet tilting a fraction. A silent invitation.

  Paris took a deep breath, the last of the serum’s fire still singing in his veins. He focused, his storm-gray eyes narrowing, trying to read her. But there was nothing. No shift in weight, no tension in her shoulders, no tell. She was a statue, a monument of perfect, unnerving stillness.

  Then he moved.

  ///

  It wasn’t a run; it was a flow of motion. With impossible grace, he closed the distance, planted his hands on the cracked marble, and used the momentum to launch himself into a spinning aerial maneuver. He uncoiled in mid-air, his leg snapping out in a devastating axe kick aimed to crush her collarbone.

  Crook deflected it. Not a block, but a precise, almost lazy swap of her forearm that guided his foot harmlessly past her shoulder, exactly as she’d predicted he would.

  But Paris had predicted her prediction.

  As he fell, he didn’t try to recover. He embraced the momentum, becoming a blur of controlled violence the moment before he hit the ground. A flurry of punches erupted from him, a storm of strikes with speed and precision that could snatch bullets from the air. Against any other opponent, it would have been a finishing move, bones would have shattered into splinters, muscles torn like wet paper.

  Crook didn’t move her feet.

  One hand, her left, moved in a micro-efficient pattern. A flick of the wrist here, a deflection of the elbow there. Pak. Pak. Pak. Pak. Each precise motion met his strikes not with force, but with perfect redirection, neutralizing the hurricane of blows as if she were swatting aside a cloud of gnats.

  In the split-second pause between one punch and the next, her right hand shot out. She didn’t strike him. She simply grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him off-balance into her space, and knocked him back with a sharp shrug of her shoulder.

  The impact was minimal, but perfectly timed. He flew back, but instead of crashing, he twisted in the air, landed in a backwards roll, and came up in a low stance, breathing heavily but poised.

  Crook finally gave a single, slight nod.

  "Almost impressive," she conceded, her voice devoid of praise. "That might have worked... if I was crippled, blind, deaf, and terminally ill."

  Paris was sweating, his breath ragged, his muscles burning.

  But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

  This was a fight to the death.Paris feinted a jab, then dropped, spinning on his heel for a low, sweeping kick, Crook simply lifted her foot an inch, letting it whistle harmlessly beneath her sole.

  Paris used the spin's momentum to launch himself back to his feet, creating a sliver of distance. His chest heaved. This was it. His third technique.

  He lunged again, not with a punch, but a kick. It was deceptively simple, a straight thrust with his heel aimed at her center of mass. The Swimming Kick. Its power wasn't in impact; it was in permeation. A shockwave designed to bypass armor and block, traveling through any defense to liquefy organs from within.

  Crook didn't dodge. Her palm met his heel, stopping it cold. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. Then, a visible ripple of concussive force traveled up her arm, through her shoulder, and across her torso, the kinetic energy being absorbed.

  Her head tilted, a scientist observing an interesting result. "A clever vector."

  Then her body unwound. The absorbed force channeled down her other arm, coalescing in her clenched fist. She thrust her knuckles forward, not at his foot, but into his chest, a precise, brutal counter-thrust.

  CRUNCH.

  The sound was wet, final. The very same force Paris had launched at her, amplified by her own impeccable structure, slammed back into him. Every one of his ribs shattered simultaneously. The air left his lungs in a silent, agonized rush. His eyes bulged, vision whiting out from the pain as his legs gave way, and he crashed to his knees on the shattered marble, gasping soundlessly.

  Crook loomed over him, her helmet tilting slightly, an ancient judge passing sentence. "The spark of talent is common," she admitted, her tone holding neither praise nor condemnation. "The discipline to forge it into an unbreakable flame is rare."

  She raised her hand, fingers curling into a fist. Her one-inch punch.

  Aim: his forehead.

  Execution: death.

  Paris braced for the end.